BNZ Literary Awards
Encouraging New Zealanders to write something beautiful.
The 2013 BNZ Literary Awards are now open. New Zealand's most distinguished short story competition is back for its 54th year.
With categories for both aspiring and established writers, everyone has the chance to join an impressive lineage of past winners, including Frank Sargeson, Keri Hulme, Maurice Shadbolt, Charlotte Grimshaw, and CK Stead.
You can enter our 150-word Short Short Story competition through Facebook or enter any of the other categories below. There's no time like the present to start writing something beautiful for the BNZ Literary Awards.
Entry categories
Entries for all the award categories are open until 30 June 2013. Winners will be announced in September 2013.
BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award category
The main award category - $10,000 prize money
Minimum length 1,000 words - maximum length 5,000 words
BNZ Novice Writer Award category
For unpublished writers - $1,500 prize money
Minimum length 1,000 words - maximum length 3,000 words
BNZ Young Writer Award category
For writers who are at secondary school - $1,500 for the student
and $2000 for the winner's school
Minimum length 750 words - maximum length 2,000 words
Print out and post the form
If you'd prefer to post in your entry for the above categories, download the form PDF 366KB
BNZ Short Short Story Award category
A short story of a maximum of 150 words - $500 prize money. Submit your entry via Facebook.
Meet the 2013 Judges
Albert Wendt - BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award Judge
Albert Wendt
Katherine Mansfield Award Judge
Albert Wendt has published four collections of short stories: Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree: And Other Stories, The Birth and Death of the Miracle Man, The Best of Albert Wendt's Short Stories, and most recently, Ancestry.
He has also published many novels, collections of poetry, and major anthologies of Pacific writing. He has won numerous awards and prizes. He has won the Commonwealth Book Prize for South East Asia and the Pacific two times and won Japan's Nikkei Asia Prize for Culture. He was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2000, and in 2012, he was awarded the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction. He also has honorary doctorates from the University of Bourgogne, France, Victoria University of Wellington, and the University of Hawai'i.
His latest works, published in 2012, are From Manoa to a Ponsonby Garden, a collection of poetry, and Ancestry, a collection of short stories.
Writing Tips PDF 118KB
Craig Cliff - BNZ Novice Writer Award Judge
Craig Cliff
Novice Writer Award Judge
Craig Cliff won the novice writer category of the BNZ Literary Awards in 2007 with his story Another Language. His debut collection of short stories,A Man Melting, was published in 2010 and went on to win the 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book. In 2012, he was one of the judges for the inaugural Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Some of his stories have been translated into Spanish and German. Craig also writes a column for the Dominion Post about his 'double life' as a writer and public servant in Wellington, where he lives with his wife and daughter. His first novel, The Mannequin Makers, will be published in August this year.
Writing Tips PDF 205KB
Sue Orr - BNZ Young Writer Award Judge
Sue Orr
Young Writer Award Judge
Sue Orr has published two prize-winning short story collections, Etiquette for a Dinner Party in 2008, which won the Lilian Ida Smith Award, and From Under the Overcoat in 2011, which was shortlisted for the New Zealand Post Book Awards in 2011 where it also won the People's Choice Award. Her work has appeared in many New Zealand and international anthologies and in the NZ Listener.
Under the NZ Society of Authors' mentoring scheme, she mentored Emily Draper, who went on to win both first and second prizes in the Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition that year.
Sue Orr was a Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellow in 2011 and is a graduate of Bill Manhire's creative writing programme at Victoria University in Wellington. She has been a journalist and editor, and is currently writing a novel and studying towards a PhD in Creative Writing at Victoria University of Wellington. She lives with her family at Narrowneck Beach in Auckland.
Writing Tips PDF 116KB
Graham Beattie - BNZ Short Short Story Award Judge
Graham Beattie
Short Short Story Award Judge
Graham Beattie is a former bookseller, and former Managing Director/Publisher of Penguin Books NZ Ltd. and Scholastic NZ Ltd. Graham now works as full-time book reviewer, book blogger, and judge of book awards as well as doing occasional consultancy work within the book industry.
Writing Tips PDF 71KB
Past winners
Winners in 2012
Winners in 2012
BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award winner - Julie Helean
BNZ Novice Writer Award winner - Nicole Tan
BNZ Young Writer Award winner - Emily Hunter
BNZ Short Short Story Award winner - Chelsea Dempsey
Winners in 2011
Winners in 2011
BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award winner - Gemma Bowker-Wright
BNZ Novice Writer Award winner - Toni Spencer
BNZ Young Writer Award winner - Chiao Lin
BNZ Short Short Story Award winner - James Francis
Winners in 2010
Winners in 2009
Winners in 2008
Winners in 2007
